in 1551.  Till his time the family had of course been Catholic; it was he who first abandoned the Faith; perhaps it was this spirit of adventure so unfortunate in him which descended to that famous “leash of brethren” and drove them out upon their adventures.  The least remarkable and the most unfortunate of these sons of his was the eldest, Thomas, whose life, however, as a soldier and freebooter, both on shore in the Low Countries and at sea, is sufficiently full of adventure to satisfy anyone.  He came, however, to utter grief at last, and had to sell Wiston, retiring to the Isle of Wight, where he died in 1630.

It was his brother Anthony who really made the Shirleys famous.  He had graduated at Oxford in 1581, and having, as he said, “acquired those learnings which were fit for a gentleman’s ornament,” he went to the Low Countries with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and was present at the battle of Zutphen, where Sir Philip Sidney fell.  In 1591 he was in Normandy with the Earl of Essex, whom he devotedly followed, in support of Henry of Navarre, who made him a knight of St Michael.  For accepting a foreign knighthood without her leave, Elizabeth locked him up in the Fleet, and only let him out when he promised to retire from the Order.  This he actually did, but his title stuck to him, and he was always known as Sir Anthony.  He then married Elizabeth Devereux, a first cousin of his patron, the Earl of Essex; but the marriage was unfortunate; he could not abide his wife, and in order to “occupy his mind from thinking of her vainest words,” in 1595 he fitted out with Essex’s aid and his father’s a buccaneering expedition to the Gulf of Guinea.  But in something less than two years after the most amazing adventures he came home to Wiston under the Downs, “alive but poor,” and with his passion for adventure in nowise abated.  In 1597 he accompanied Essex on the “Islands voyage,” but, seeking more paying adventure, in the winter of 1598 he consented at Essex’s suggestion to lead a little company of English adventurers to assist Cesare D’Este to regain his Duchy of Ferrara, then in the hands of the Pope.  He set forth, but upon reaching Venice found that Cesare had submitted.  Again he was out of employment; but it was upon the quays of Venice that he conceived the most astonishing enterprise that even an Englishman has ever undertaken.  He proposed to set out for Persia with the object of persuading the Shah to ally himself with Christendom against the Turk, and hoped also to establish commercial relations between England and Persia.  Upon this astonishing Crusade he left Venice with his brother Robert and twenty-five Englishmen disappointed of a row in Ferrara, on May 29, 1599, for Constantinople.  Thence he went on to Aleppo, and so down the Euphrates, to Babylon, to Isapahan and Kazveen, where he met the Shah Abbas the Great.  There, thanks to the Shah’s two Christian wives, he had a good reception; the rank of Prince was conferred upon him, and he